This week, it's back to sexist business as usual. On Saturday, the Serpentine gallery launches its Poetry Marathon with more than 65 individual artists and writers. Only 18 are women. It's taking place in the special pavilion whose only solo female architect to date has been Zaha Hadid, nine years ago. Last year, the Manifesto Marathon had the same gender ratio. In 2007, a marathon of experiments and demonstrations: 34 men, 10 women. In 2006, an Interview Marathon, same breakdown.

This is not to rag the Serpentine about its misogyny. It's only following the herd, when it comes to keeping the numbers of women in public life down. But how can people be so blind to it, when it's so obvious? Unless, that is, they don't mind, are not interested in what women think or create and do not miss women's absence.

Do I think it's a misogynist conspiracy and that all the producers, curators and commissioners in all the arts fields in all countries decided together to make women a minority? No. It's worse than that: it's a coincidence, demonstrating just how ubiquitous and automatic misogyny is. The only time women are over-represented is as pieces of meat selling things in adverts, unpaid carers, underpaid professionals attempting to achieve justice in tribunals and unvindicated victims of harassment, discrimination and sexual and domestic violence.

I have been a critic for 16 years, across all arts disciplines and all media. It is simply not true that there are not enough women artists, commentators, writers and critics to achieve parity in arts events, whether they are poetry festivals or radio programmes. I used to present a radio show in which, a number of times, there were six male guests and no women, "just by accident". The majority of times there was one woman. We discussed virtually no works created by women artists, writers or thinkers. Not once were there all women guests, "just by accident".

It fills me with ice cold rage. Men and women both like to worship men, for some reason; women even, perversely, love to promote men who themselves hate women (hello, Roth'n'Updike fans. How's it going?). Both sexes unquestioningly perpetuate the boys' club through the invites issued to men, the opportunities, associations, deals and chances offered. The talks, readings, colloquia, special trips, lectures and guest spots are organised by women for the benefit of men's careers. For the men, the glory, status, visibility, influence and enshrinement in history. For the women, the expected but unacknowledged work.

I've spent the last six weeks making documentaries that involved interviewing several prominent male artists. Their teams of assistants, PRs and administrators were always all female, efficient, intelligent and erudite – in galleries that almost never show women artists' work. The men themselves rarely bothered even to look me in the eye when I was interviewing them. These men did not respect women, and enacted that disrespect blatantly in every encounter with women. They never, ever name-checked women writers, artistic, politicians or thinkers as influences. Yet we women helped their careers.

Rewind a few months to a radio item I did on the Annette Messager retrospective at the Hayward Gallery. Privately, one of the gallery's PR team mentioned how noticeable it was that the vast majority of the usual male critics, attendees, academics, writers, artists and art world supporters had stayed away in their droves and just, by sorrowful accident and bad logistical luck, somehow couldn't fit in a visit/article/essay/event to support the show.

It is time for women to realise how little they are respected, how little their presence is liked, how this antipathy is expressed and how very easy it is to spot: they do not want us around, so they do not invite us, though we may pay to worship. Misogyny is not something forcefully, loudly imposed by a mighty superpower. It is constantly, silently, automatically enacted by all the people present, including those who feel perturbed but don't speak up.

The status quo did not arise by accident. The anti-woman society is constructed every day, collectively, before our eyes.